Virtually all marxists have been confused by Capital…Best to leave it behind at this point.
We are postmarxist ‘marxists’ here: we have been critical of the marx corpus but have sugggested taking marx/engels historically as a core heroic sage, wary of the theories of marx that don’t really work and which are misleading the left.
Our key objection is to theories as such and two in particular: historical materialism and ‘stages of production’ theory. The economic perspective of historical materialism simply doesn’t work for world history and the progression of epochs, i.e. feudalism to capitalism to communism doesn’t work either. But these are taken as dogmas by marxists and in controlling the thought processes of much of the left the whole left is in a muddle. Theories in the social sciences don’t really work as science and to have claimed his work as science, marx unwittingly turned his work into a religion, of sorts. There is a lot to say here (and we will replicate the many discussions of this in the old darwiniana) but the calamity of bolshevism was in part the fault of marx’s confusion over the stages of production: there is no automatic future to communism: that teleological theory which lacks the right emphasis on free agency confused the whole sequence of internationals and confused lenin at the exact point where it was necessary to create a communist system, with disastrous results…(to be continued)